[OT, WHIMSY] old experience with hardware, was Linux-compatible printer

[Terrence Enger]

On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 08:46 -0500, edward chin wrote:
> I've been using a Brother HL-2040 for more than 2yrs with no problems
> except the
> occassional paper jam - caused by my use of a mixture of differing
> paper weights.

That reminds of when I was a computer operator.  Yes, that really was my
title, and I really had a glass room, so you can tell that it was a long
time ago.

The printer was a drum printer.  It weighed about a ton and it had a
powered mechanism to open and close the cover.  It printed an amazing
132 columns on 15-inch continuous forms.

In a push for economy, the company decided to reuse old reports by
printing on the backside.  A certain smartass, who will remain nameless
to protect the guilty, pointed out that a lot of the reports printed
down the left side of the page, so they could start from the other end
and get two more passes.  And if the ribbon was old--as it usually
was--then they could put in a bright new ribbon and get four more passes
on the same forms.  Somehow nobody took me^H^H the guy seriously.

In another economy move, the company tried using newsprint in this line
printer.  The number of paper jams in a 12-hour shift could almost
reduce an operator to tears.  The engineer responsible for maintaining
the printer explained that this was not a problem, it was a feature.  It
was a special security feature for reports so secret that *nobody* was
allowed to read them.

Another time, the sweep amplifiers failed in the console CRT, reducing
the display to about one square centimetre in the center of the tube.
That same engineer extolled this behaviour as "a miracle of
miniaturization".

Cheers,
Terry.


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